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as the article mentions, CSV is not well defined. libraries are.. well, different. you'd spend as much time becoming familiar with one as you would writing a ba

by foxhill 12y ago

as the article mentions, CSV is not well defined. libraries are.. well, different. you'd spend as much time becoming familiar with one as you would writing a basic parser. commas don't delimit field entries? CSV -> comma separated values. new lines inside a field? i've never written a parser that would be foiled by this. could be an issue if you use a built-in tokeniser (e.g strtok, etc.). be aware. variable number of fields? you’re probably writing this for something with an expected input form. throw errors if you see something you do not accept. make sure you catch them. ascii/unicode? yea. it’s a fucking mess. everywhere. just do it. handle failure gracefully. learn from your mistakes. don't be naive. consider a library if the (risk of failure):(time) ratio is skewed the wrong way. the only time i would absolutely insist that a 3rd party library be used is when crypto is involved. even then, be aware that they are not perfect. absolutely ignore people who's argument is along the lines of "you are not smart enough to implement this standard. let someone else do it.”. fuck everything about that statement, and it’s false sense of superiority. nothing comes for free. wether you use a library, or do your own thing, you’re going to run into problems.

Roboprog 12y ago
On the one hand, I hear you. On the other hand... Too many "enterprise" coworkers who don't know how to write a finite state machine. They do need to use a library.
B-Con 12y ago
> absolutely ignore people who's argument is along the lines of "you are not smart enough to implement this standard. let someone else do it.”. fuck everything about that statement, and it’s false sense of superiority. In general it's not about being smart enough (although for some complicated standards maybe it's true), but rather biting off more than you realize. Everything sounds simple before you find the edge case implementation issues and have to rework and rethink a bunch of hard issues that a dozen people have already thought through. Doing it yourself is on the table, but rarely the most efficient decision.

by foxhill 12y ago

Roboprog 12y ago

On the one hand, I hear you. On the other hand... Too many "enterprise" coworkers who don't know how to write a finite state machine. They do need to use a library.

B-Con 12y ago

> absolutely ignore people who's argument is along the lines of "you are not smart enough to implement this standard. let someone else do it.”. fuck everything about that statement, and it’s false sense of superiority. In general it's not about being smart enough (although for some complicated standards maybe it's true), but rather biting off more than you realize. Everything sounds simple before you find the edge case implementation issues and have to rework and rethink a bunch of hard issues that a dozen people have already thought through. Doing it yourself is on the table, but rarely the most efficient decision.